IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

and optimize the distribution of the energy between all its different
functions.’’ 6
Smartness 191
We’re in a transition from an industrial system organized on the basis of
the idea that material is cheap and that shape—the forming processes—is
expensive. ‘‘To make a structure that stands up, we have tended to slap on
layers of heavy reinforcement, which we call redundancy, not to design it
more cunningly,’’ says Vincent. Nature has completely internalized the
chemistry of materials and the need to recycle. ‘‘We would not be here,’’
says Vincent, ‘‘had not our ancestors rotted. All organisms are designed
with the intention of being recycled. Learning from nature, this means we
have to be careful about bond energies in materials and see that they can be
broken down easily.’’ 7
Light structures need not only to use less matter, but also to use their
matter more effectively. According to scientists at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC), materials with these properties could be used in
the future to build skyscrapers with ‘‘smart’’ structural columns that can
change their physical properties. These columns could stiffen the building
to resist high wind loads but could also soften it to help it ride out shock
waves from an earthquake. 8 The problem with a technology-based smart
structure—with its sensors, actuators, structural members, and control
hardware—is that it’s complex. Many elements have to work in harmony
together to produce a system that works. So-called active systems of this
kind require fast, real-time, stable, and failure-free computing. Scaling
them up so that the system includes the deployment of the millions of
sensors you’d need in a large building poses a tremendous complexity challenge
in the design of software control architectures.
Could smartness be simpler? Researchers at Smart Architecture, in Holland,
in their search for light structural solutions, have looked at the foundations
that houses, factories, and other structures rest on. 9 The Earth itself
is easily strong enough to support houses, towers, and offices. But builders
have become accustomed to the tradition of hammering or pushing heavy
concrete piles, weighing thousands of tons, deep into the ground. In
Amsterdam, where I live, concrete piles sixty feet long are being hammered
by gigantic machines into the Earth, one meter apart, as I (try to) write.
Smart architecture proposes, as an alternative, to build structures on a light
‘‘floating’’ raft made out of polystyrene foam. This can only be part of the
solution, since the density of the ground and the mud under a building